Hey everyone,

I installed mandrake 10 on my pc a while ago to see what linux was all about. So far it's ok, but it made windows unbootable. That made me angry so i reformatted the windows partition to a linux partition.

Now i want to put windows back on, but it wont let me. I have an XP Home cd that came with my pc, but for some reason it wont auto-boot. I double checked the boot sequence but it's correct.

So, i downloaded a win98 bootdisk to boot to the winxp cd, but it says it 'can't make enough swap space for installation' or something similar, and shuts down again. I figured it can't handle the linux partitions.

So, how do i format a linux partition back to FAT32? I tried with the application that comes with KDE to empty and delete the partition, but windows still says it has no room anywhere.

you can try format disk with Boot disket Partition Magic 7.0 , delete and format back again...or you can try with FDISk with Bootable Disk and do it to delete partition or create partition.

i appreciate the reply, but i don't really understand that (sorry )

the problem is, is that the win98 FDISK doesn't recognise my linux partitions. I heard the winxp CD can handle that, but that one doesn't auto-start (see first post)

You can use linux fdisk and prepare the partitions. I don't think linux fdisk can create a ntfs partition (perhaps newer versions can.. I'm no fdisk expert) but you could create a fat32-partition and that should be detectable by your win98-stuff.

Then when you have winxp installed you can convert the fat32 into ntfs if you want.

I'm also no expert on windows XP but I think you need to have it on the first partition on the first hd. (I have my xp on first partition second hd and use grub to fool xp to think it's on the first hd using the map command)

if u go to microsoft download centre u can download 6 boot up floppys. U can then use these to reboot ur pc and install winxp.
But your win98 boot up floppy should be able fdisk all ur partitions.
eg delete all partitions, set new partition and then make active. reboot with floppy still in the format c:
then if cd will still not run auto install then go with the first option of 6 set up disks.